Culture Beef is a synthesized meat product made from the harvested muscle cells taken from a living cow. The cells are nurtured in a laboratory, where they multiply to create tiny strands of meat muscle tissue.

Dr. Mark Post, Cultured Beef founder

Post, a professor at the Netherlands's Maastricht University, has been developing Cultured Beef for five years.

Post At Work In The Laboratory

It takes 20,000 strands of lab-cultivated meat tissue strands to create a single Cultured Beef burger.

Culture Beef Has A "Cake-Like" Quality

The food scientist Hanni Rützler described the burger's exterior as "surprisingly crunchy," and both she and fellow taster, author Josh Schonwald, described its texture as "cake-like."

The Finished Product

Schonwald, one of Cultured Beef's first public taste-testers, described the burger as " a cross between a Boca Burger and a McDonald's burger."

The World's First Test-Tube Burger Tastes Like "A Cross Between A Boca Burger And McDonald's"

Today's Most Creative Person, Dr. Mark Post, has created a synthetic meat burger from 20,000 strands of harvested cow muscle with the backing of Google's Sergey Brin. Interesting, but was it well done?

Would you eat a burger made from 20,000 strands of lab-harvested cow muscle tissue? Dr. Mark Post, today's Most Creative Person, is trying to sell the world on a future filled with sustainable, synthesized, and, hopefully, succulent meat.

Post and his fellow researchers create Cultured Beef by harvesting the muscle cells of a live cow in what they say is a painless process. They nurture the extracted muscle cells in a laboratory, where the cells multiply and grow into small strands of meat muscle tissue. Approximately 20,000 strands are combined to create a single, normal-sized hamburger.

Cultured Beef is currently being funded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who Post says shares the team's concerns about sustainable food production and animal welfare. As of May, Brin was reported to have invested $325,000 in Post's research.

The result of that research is a fatless product that sits in stark contrast to the Golden Ratio in burger-making—most connoisseurs agree a composite of about 80% lean beef to 20% fat is what lends the best burgers their luscious bite and aromatic juices. But Post thinks Cultured Beef has the potential to be both a commercially viable substitute for traditionally farmed meat and a solution for the growing global demand for meat, which the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts will increase by more than two-thirds in the near future.

Some critics of synthesized meat say a better approach to any pending food shortage crisis would be to cut down on global meat consumption altogether. But supporters of synthesized meat say it has the potential to address sustainability issues in current meat production practices, such as greenhouse gas emissions and water usage, as well as increase food security for a growing population.

But what about the taste?

"It's somewhere between a Boca Burger and a McDonald's burger," Schonwald said, while Rützler described its taste as resembling "meatloaf without any salt and pepper."

Both Rützler and Schonwald agreed the burger had an almost "cake-like quality," and said the actual temperature of the meat was hotter than they had expected.

For now, Post's focus with Cultured Beef will remain on minced meat. But he says his ambition is to create thicker pieces of meat that could ultimately yield a steak. Perhaps an equally difficult challenge for Post and his backer, Brin, will be in turning the public on to his new form of lab-grown meat. When one reporter at today's press conference asked how Post plans to "overcome the 'yuck' factor" of test-tube meat, the creator played to a possible selling point of growing your own meat: You know exactly where it's coming from.

"Potentially, you can do this in your kitchen. You can grow your own meat," Post says. Jokingly, he adds: "But you have to know what you want to eat eight weeks in advance."

Every year, Fast Company names its Most Creative People100 Most Creative People[/url], highlighting the global leaders in tech, design, media, music, movies, marketing, television, sports, and more. Post, and other thought leaders, will be considered for 2014's list.

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This is funny. It's better than killing animals to eat them. But it will take all the bloodlust out of it for men. Men are rather dim and need to feel big and strong by killing animals. Once they're not doing that, no fun anymore. Of course I don't mean men killing *their own* meat, but the vicarious experience seems to be enough for them...

Its not like this creation is forcing you to never eat a real burger again, but it is a great step in helping to end hunger where there isn't much meat to be hunted. I'm sure there are plenty of starving kids who don't care that it doesn't taste like the best burger in Texas.